Asking for Help When You Don’t Conform to Social Expectations

Content warning for transphobia and misogyny.

At the gas station recently, my coworker noticed a young woman, dressed in a miniskirt, struggling to replace the vacuum hose atop its rack. My coworker, a red-blooded (and red-hatted) American male, approached her to ask if she needed help.

She spun around, and all he saw were masculine facial features. He (said he) apologized for scaring her, and then he took his scorn and disgust and left her to struggle alone.

I won’t repeat his rationalizations. I’m sure his reasoning went more like: he saw a chance to get himself laid, and as soon as he realized that chance didn’t fit his expectations, that person was on their own.

Having been accosted by strange angry men in parking lots, I’m sure that trans woman was scared speechless. Likely, she would have been even if decency in the form of Kamala Harris had won the election.

Here’s why that matters: because men like these, who seem prepared to use their physical strength for you, can easily turn it against you.

Often, we never know the reasons why they flip the switch. They just decide we deserve it.

And that affects a whole lot more of us than trans people alone.

What expectations of conformity do to our sense of community

My amygdala remembered this, even as the rest of my brain struggled to find the right words to convey to my coworker that he could’ve just helped her out because that’s what good humans do. That her transness wasn’t as much of a threat to him as his muscles and height were to her. That I wondered what about her and her identity could possibly be so threatening to him.

While I was still trying to get the words out in a way that would maintain my own sense of safety, he left the room.

Men like him aren’t interested in dialogue, after all. They only want to drop their payload and leave others to sort the wreckage they leave behind.

I felt for that trans woman, though, beyond just the immediate threat my coworker presented. I also know intimately what it’s like to ask for help, but not receive it because you don’t conform to the ways other people expect women to look and act.

You’re too assertive about asking — or not assertive enough. You should ask humbly, but not in a way that sounds manipulative. You should be prepared to reciprocate. You should receive without feeling compelled to give back. You should be responsible with what you’re given. You shouldn’t keep asking.

Confused? I have been. ADHD and CPTSD (and maybe a side of autism) cause me to take such advice literally, and to try to reconcile the conflicts they presented through sheer force of will and logic.

Ultimately, though, all these conflicts led to was shutdown, which I suspect was the point. People don’t really want other people to ask them for help.

The problem is that when you don’t ask — when you conform to the ultimate expectation of total, compliant silence — you give tacit permission for people to stay in the comfortable, convenient bubbles of their own beliefs.

What if that trans woman had felt unthreatened enough to take my coworker up on his offer of help? He’d have had to confront the idea that he might not be as helpful as he likes to believe. That he only helps women in order to extract something from them.

That maybe he’s not actually all that great a guy.

Confronting our conformist illusions breaks down barriers

These are the kinds of illusions we all maintain about ourselves. Finding out that we might not be the hero in someone else’s story — that we might be the villain or even the bystander — isn’t very pleasant. But it’s the start of the growth we are all, as humans, called to go through.

In my own story, for example, I’m a single mom struggling just to make ends meet. Both in my marriage and as a professional, I stood on principle and got left holding a very big, very heavy bag. I want help holding it, but everyone seems to think I’m strong enough to manage on my own.

In their stories, they’re:

• Delivering the dose of tough love they think I need to stave off denial. But “Just get a job” only goes so far when the work you had burned you out, and the only work you can find doesn’t offer a living wage.
• Shoring up my strength with pep talks. But “Just work multiple jobs” leave you with little time or energy to “manage” investments or property — if you weren’t trying to use all available wages to maintain a home and the vehicle you use to get to work.
• Offering practical, friendly, even loving advice to a somewhat scatterbrained friend. But “Just budget” is cruel advice in a time of greedflation outpacing wages and billionaires ripping off the U.S. Treasury. Most of us know we’re one emergency away from losing everything.
• Giving me the permission they think I won’t give myself. But “Just apply for assistance” fails to recognize families who hover so close to the poverty line that sometimes wages render them ineligible for assistance, and you have to hit the application timing just right, and your timing may not sync with the shifts you’re working.
• Reminding me that help is available, even if it’s not from them. But “Just ask family” assumes family are willing to help, not struggling with their own expenses, and aren’t judging you for the same failures everyone else does. It also assumes you live close enough to rely on, say, housing or transportation, which come with plenty of their own conditions.
• Again with the tough love. But “Put your ego aside” assumes you haven’t already, over and over, to the point where you’re not sure you even recognize yourself anymore.

No wonder trans people choose living as themselves. Because all those “just” expectations really are, are demands for us to conform to the social norms we think society can’t function without: 

The boxes we put people in that say that women are bad with money and real men do things themselves, that women need men to take care of them and men need women to take care of — and gender nonconforming people neither need nor are needed by anyone else.

Curiosity, not control, engenders (pun intended) community

Transgender rights are human rights because — surprise! — not even cisgender white men totally conform to the social expectations people have for them. We see this in their insecurity and control issues: they know they can’t hold themselves to such rigid social expectations.

If they could, then the phrase “toxic masculinity” wouldn’t exist — much less frighten and hurt so many people.

I’m calling on them, and all of us, to let go of the control. To get curious about why we expect things of ourselves as well as others. And to confront inconvenient realities that coexist.

Drag Queen Story Hour is an affront to children’s innocence? OK, then make sure you also protest the rampant sexual abuse in houses of worship.

Single moms should be more responsible with the money they get? OK, then call for affordable childcare and better mental health counseling for couples and for god’s sake, more equitable pay and an end to price gouging and a dozen other things I’m not thinking of.

For myself, part of allyship is to hold space for myself as a survivor of trauma who still struggles to speak up and confront people who I perceive could overpower me. Just because my experiences allow me to empathize with my trans sisters doesn’t mean my amygdala got the memo. She and I still have work to do.

In the meantime, I have my online voice, as well as the voice that’s learning to ask for help when I need it. I hope you’ll join, at whatever level you can, to support me in sharing my learnings.